I've been playing around with OpenBSD on a spare laptop in an attempt to find a free Unix that makes me want to slit my wrists less than Linux, and so far things have been going pretty well. However, graphical performance isn't what it could be, because evidently there's no acceleration. The laptop is a Compaq nc6000 with a 64MB Mobility Radeon 9600, which is an R350 and does appear to be in the radeon driver's supported list, but it looks like the radeon DRI driver isn't getting launched in the first place. glxinfo spits out this:

...and then goes on to give information for Mesa's GL capabilities. I'm curious, it looks like this is some kind of permissions issue? A quick Google search turned up suggestions that it stems from my launching X from a user account that doesn't have permissions for the DRM device and that the solution is to add the user account to the video group, but /etc/group.conf doesn't even have a video group listed. Can someone help me resolve this?

There were many 9600 variants. And with "permissions" that got me thinking of the xf86(4) aperture driver. However the message is more clear if the aperture must be opened, and at OpenBSD 5.5 the aperture driver should no longer be required.

Could you please do us a favor and post both your dmesg and a copy of /var/log/Xorg.0.log? One would tell us a lot more about your hardware from OpenBSD's perspective, the other would tell us what OpenBSD's version of X.Org -- Xenocara -- thinks is going on regarding your hardware configuration.

So I'm not sure what the issue is .. perhaps a glxinfo or configuration problem? Which leads me to note that you are using an xorg.conf file. What happens when you run X without an xorg.conf file and X autoconfigures?

Unrelated, but I saw that your kernel is at 5.5-release. There's a patch for the kernel to correct ICMP reflection handling, which you may want or need.

This will play from the first CD-ROM drive, cd0, by default. Note that the user running cdio should have permissions to read the CD-ROM device (e.g. /dev/rcd0c). As this device is only readable by root or the operator group by default, for convenience you may want to add the user to the operator group by adjusting this group's line in /etc/group. Alternatively, you can modify the file permissions of the device as needed.

Do you encounter your trouble as a connected user, or as root ?
Is there a difference between user/root or not ?
Did you try to chmod the related file ?

Also it's possible to edit the /etc/group file (no .conf suffix), and add a video operator group, but I never tried those kind of thing.
But if you know the name of the video operator group you need, could worth a try.

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So for completeness's sake, I logged into the root account and started X from it. glxinfo shows it using Gallium on an R350, so it looks like it definitely is an issue with permissions. I guess I'll try chmodding those devices and see if that works.

Update: works perfectly, and now compton works with WindowMaker, which was what I was hoping for. Thanks for the help!

I cannot find compton in the OpenBSD ports list and wonder why you are not using xcompmgr which is included in the base install. I run simple compositing with a Radeon HD2400X and do not have any problems with drm permissions. Is there a compton port that I cannot find or did you compile it yourself?

Also jiggimi had mentioned that i386 platforms should set machdep.allowaperture=2 in /etc/sysctl.conf.
More on the aperture here.

Also jiggimi had mentioned that i386 platforms should set machdep.allowaperture=2 in /etc/sysctl.conf.
More on the aperture here.

I did mention it. It's not an issue here, as the aperture driver was shown to be enabled per the Xorg.0.log above:

Code:

checkDevMem: using aperture driver /dev/xf86

I mentioned above, that at 5.5 the aperture window is no longer required if you use KMS vdeo -- that would be the inteldrm(4) and radeondrm(4) drivers. The installation script still asks because the platform may use a non-KMS video driver.

I cannot find compton in the OpenBSD ports list and wonder why you are not using xcompmgr which is included in the base install. I run simple compositing with a Radeon HD2400X and do not have any problems with drm permissions. Is there a compton port that I cannot find or did you compile it yourself?

I compiled compton myself; I didn't know about xcompmgr being included, and I didn't want to go with compiz because it's also a window manager on top of being a compositor, and Window Maker already does just fine as a window manager. Besides, I don't really want eye candy so much as just better window-manager performance. I'll take a look into xcompmgr, but compton isn't the issue here; glxinfo still has issues with the permissions whether compton is started or not.